(LOL)If you send an e-mail to a commercial company, you have a reply on the same day. Why it is not so for open source people? They are always busy?

maybe it's you .

maybe it's the emails you are sending, but also, you must remember, a large portion of the people working on open source projects do so on their own time. They are also busy with their full-time jobs and families, just like everyone else.

I have emailed several people involved with open-source projects over the years, and while it did occasionally take a few days to receive a response, I have ALWAYS received a polite and helpful response.

Also, companies generally have teams of people dedicated to monitoring and responding to emails.

Be polite and patient when attempting to contact an open-source programmer, and you will be pleasantly surprised.

R.

How much money have you paid the open source developer? Unless you're paying for support, a response to an email is a courtesy.

Forums like this, mailing lists, etc, exist exactly to fill the need of a lot of support in the community-driven environment ingrained in the open source philosophy.

I'd be willing to bet that a random e-mail to a member of this forum would get a substantive reply quicker than an e-mail to Microsoft.

More generally, I have found that the "quick response" from a commercial company is usually a form letter thanking me for my concern and promising to get back to me soon.

Its all about how you write it.

+1 for politeness

Most apps got mailing lists,forums,irc and whatelse.Many devs get annoyed when you send emails instead of trying other channels first.
Also many apps do have commercial support - meaning they wont fix it for free for one guy while there are paying customers.

It just different than lets say MS.There you can find next to no info besides 'Try to reinstall' on public forums because the people that really know make their living from that info and sure ain't going to make it public.There is no shortage of information on open source apps.

If you pay me I will respond to all your emails; but no promises there will be helpful information

flame-bait moved to greener pastures where trolls can't up
their post-count ...

That said: I've always had better success contacting OpenSource
people than commercial ones. Of course there may be exceptions:
I'd imagine that people like the man himself [Linus] get so many
mails that it's practically impossible to answer them all if you
want to have a life away from your e-Mail client.

And given the OPs style the mails probably get eaten by a
SPAM-filter to begin with ;D


Cheers,
Tink

I am here in this frum for last one year, and all of our members are boadminded and helping other to grow with them ,

In better than 10 years I have yet to have an open source developer fail to reply to an email. Maybe you just don't know how to write a respectful email?

i always reply to emails i get about my open source project. maybe that's because i only get one a week or less.

OK, here's a chance to plug it (F/OSS only). What / where is your project?


From a user POV, and like most of you experienced, almost all developers I contacted in the past responded more or less on time and to the point. From a developer POV I find there's few things to wish for...

Broken code everywhere
Users pissing on the beta, you know they just don't care
I can't --fuzz their diffs, I can't take the noise
Got no r'lease to move out, I guess I got no choice
C'llissions on the tracker, bugs creepin' back
Who whacked my code with a baseball bat!??^&$*&%^
I tried to get goin', but I couldn't get far
Cause the crash on the server relocated my tar.

Don't push me, cause I'm close to the eeeeedge
I'm trying not to loose my head
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
How I keep from going under


What I mean is that some "users" don't seem to be bothered with reading the docs / FAQ / mailing list archives before asking even the most basic questions. If you go terse on them they find you impolite, inconsiderate and whatnot. Luckily if they ask on the users mailing list then usually a few other users will jump in, but answering the same questions year after year like they're the first is not rewarding at all. (Sure it reads "you have to subscribe to the mailing list before asking questions" throughout the package but some can't even read *that*.) Then there are those that can't be bothered with using the "right" channels (tracker and mailing list at Sourceforge) and contact a developer instead (like I got nothing to do). (Funny thing is that happens here at LQ too, users contacting a moderator and *demanding* an answer.) Finally there's those that lack netiquette. Now I don't need anybody thanking the team for what we do and terse emails will do, but no salutations? IRC-like abbreviations and whatnot? Man, that sometimes does make me wonder... Is it all that bad? No it ain't, and without interaction with developers, contributors and users alike no improvements will be made, I realise that. But it's just that some users don't understand they need developers and that being polite and considerate goes a long way...

http://littlesvr.ca/isomaster

I don't expect people to read documentation. Not even the readme. And that's ok, as long as they aren't extremely rude I'll answer their question and help them.

Strangely I don't get many trolls emailing me. And I think I know why. There's no forum or mailing list or public bug tracker, to get in touch with the project people have to email a person - me.

It could be that in a public place people are less considerate about what they say. Coming to a forum with thousands of posts they don't feel like they're talking to a person. Come to think of it there isn't a real-life parallel to a public forum for the regular John Doe. So whatever social etiquette John has learned in real life doesn't really apply.

That's my attempt at explaining it.

/isomaster
I see it got included in some distro's repo's as well. Cool.


whatever social etiquette John has learned in real life doesn't really apply.
I disagree, but I don't think this is the right thread to discuss things in wrt the OP's questions.
If you're interested discussing things we could open a thread and --relocate there.